This book is SO good. Part memoir, part true crime, it takes a deep look into trauma around sexual violence, rape culture, the judicial system, college football culture, family drama and psychology. It sounds like a lot going on, and it was, but it all worked together so well! The writing was engaging and informative. It kept my interest and I learned so much. I will definitely be recommending this book often! Loved it!

A great read! Part memoir part true crime. This book was a page turner and so intriguing, it held my attention from start to finish.

My first book to read by this author but definitely not my last! Such a gripping novel that made it hard for me to put his book down once I started it. Highly recommend!!

I went into this book blind and really enjoyed it. I thought Krouse's weaving in of her past along with her findings during her investigation were enlightening and further humanized the victims. Harrowing story and definitely not lighthearted material but a great read. I highly recommend it.

I couldn’t finish sadly. I do love true crime and a good memoir but I wasn’t able to build a connection or feel the need to go further.

Tell Me Everything kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Part memoir, I really enjoyed learning about Krouse and how she ended up in an investagatory field. For me, the less exciting part was the true crime and actual investigation.

4/5 Stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Flatiron Books for providing me an e-arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was powerful!!! This book missed an investigation with also being a memoir at the same time. I recommend this for any woman who has experienced sexual harassment in any form. A powerful read that will depress you but I believe needs to be read.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.

Tell me everything centers around a PI with a knack for investigation that uncovers a sexual assault. I love that this was part memoir and part nonfiction. Truly such an engrossing read that makes you want to stand up for those who need us the most.

Have you every thrown a book across the room in frustration but then picked it up immediately cause you cannot stop reading?? That was me with this book! I have never been so equally obsessed and disgusted with a book in my life, but honestly I think that was the whole point with this book. As a woman we have all had some connection to sextual assault or rape (either or selves or someone we know) and that made this book so much more heartbreaking because it focuses on huge rape case brought against a university in the early 2000's. The author is researching this case while also unpacking her own experience with rape and it made it so powerful.

Erika’s background and how she wove her own story into the case she was working on made it really fast to read (even though I sat on this one and wouldn’t go past the first 30 pages for a few days, I don’t know if I couldn’t get into it or what). Some of Erika’s experiences elicited a huge response in me - the relationship with her mom being the biggest one….I hated her mom and X by the end of the book, and I’m happy that Erika was able to formulate this work from her experiences, because I was ready to go slit some tires for her. Definitely a good rec if you want to dive into the memoir/true crime case genre!

"Tell Me Everything" was one part true crime, one part memoir, and one part trivia night as Erika shares how she became a private investigator working on one of the biggest college campus sexual assault cases. Her nontraditional route to becoming a PI was what attracted me to the book, and what I found most interesting. However, her tale of "the university" case is also woven through with stories of her own sexual assault and somewhat random anecdotes about the history of private investigators, chinooks, jiu-jitsu, and more.

What I loved: As I said before, I enjoyed reading about her quest to become a PI and all the learning on the job she did. I think she did a great job of showcasing how tedious the work can be but also how rewarding when you finally get a breakthrough. Unlike many others, I didn't mind that she also shared some of her own stories. It really emphasized how difficult this particular project was for her mentally, emotionally, and even physically.

What I didn't love: The content can naturally be really hard to read at times. But I also had a really hard time reading about her own anxiety and breakdown — though it was a well-done parallel to what the victims might be going through. I also really wish that every. single. name. didn't have to be changed. It's a pretty public case and it doesn't take much to figure out all the parties involved.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Thank you to Net Galley and Flatiron books for an e-ARC.

This was a tough one for me to rate/write about since so much of it is so brilliant, but there was something that didn't work about it - something I couldn't quite put my finger on that kept it from being a shining five star read. Then I watched an online author event and something Krouse said made the lightbulb switch on for me.

But let me back up. This is a memoir that blends the author's professional and personal stories. In the early 2000s, Erika Krouse worked as a private investigator for a law firm gearing up to fight a civil case against a big university. A college student had been blatantly and horrifically sexually assaulted at a party that involved football recruits and the players hosting them ("showing them a good time"). It was widely known this attack happened and nothing was done about it. The players stayed in school, kept playing, and there were no criminal charges. Why? Because that's just how things were done, according to everyone. Football players were campus gods and never had to answer to anyone for anything.

The victim in this case refused to accept this. She contacted an attorney who wanted to go after the university in civil court, claiming a Title IX violation. Any university receiving federal funds needs to ensure that students have equal access to education. The law firm wanted to make the argument that, by, at BEST - ignoring and at WORST - propping up a culture of sexual assault surrounding the football program and then punishing the victims after such attacks occurred, the university was depriving female students of the equal right to an education.

Our author, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse herself, has one of those faces that seems familiar to many people. Complete strangers swear they know her from somewhere and inexplicably begin divulging secrets to her - things they've not even told loved ones. The lawyer taking on the civil case was one of those people when he bumped into Krouse at a book store and after he started spilling his guts to her and she told him that kind of thing happens to her all the time, he offered her a job on the spot.

Krouse's job was to get people involved with this situation to talk to her, find out what secrets were hidden, and help put the pieces of the puzzle together; their collective job was to prove the university knew about this culture of SA and chose to ignore it, likely because they wanted to keep the players on the field and out of a jail cell. Hard to win a football game - those lucrative, brutal spectacles - with your star athletes behind bars.

As our author takes on these interviews and learns how to be a PI by showing up and acting like one, a lot of her past trauma comes bubbling to the surface. During this same time, she met the man who would go on to become her husband and she was also learning how to let go of hope that her own family would, at the very least, acknowledge the abuse she endured.

The beginning sections had me absolutely hooked. Krouse writes with such passion and brings this time to life even though we're almost two decades separated from these events. Her background as a fiction writer and all the observational skills that requires seems to have given her an additional edge as a PI and certainly helped her faithfully tell this riveting story.

But the snag in this book happens when her own story of her fractured relationship with her mother becomes the dominant element. It's here the author lost some (not all) control of the storytelling. While I'm certainly glad she was able to tell her story and communicate how hard of a time she had dealing with her mother, it's very rocky terrain, reading-wise.

In the author talk I referenced at the start of this review, Krouse admits that 1) the first draft of much of what she wrote is what made it into the final book and 2) some people told her to cut some of those family sections but she wanted to leave them in, so she did.

This is where memoir gets tricky. Because yes, it's the author's story and they should be able to tell it the way they want. But also, they're releasing it in a book and asking for money for it. If this were a diary entry, you wouldn't need to consider the reader. But that's not what a memoir is. Had the section about her mother been edited more and had some repetitive parts been removed (I'm talking minor changes overall), it would have felt more balanced with the rest of the book and less like the reader was being asked to be her therapist.

I honestly felt uncomfortable reading those sections - not because of the author's traumas or hard truths, but because it felt like she was so out of control. Not just in the past moments she was writing about, but actually while she was writing it. It felt like it was still raw to her.

This book is 95% perfect. The story is incredible, the work they did was so important, I loved the writing. But I stubbed my toe on that element and it's holding me back from giving this the five stars I really wanted to give it.

Erika Krouse's part memoir part true crime is painful to read yet riveting. She has a way about her where people confide in her and she is hired by an attorney as a PI. She works on a college rape case and football rape culture is explored through the stories of young women who were victims. Kruse herself was sexually abused as a child and chronicles her estrangement with her family. Her recollection of her relationship with her mother is heartbreaking. The legal parts of the book are interesting and tension builds as more pieces fall into place. A familiar case on violence against women and title IX, a difficult but worthwhile read.

Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

Unique perspective in the true crime world. I love all things true crime so this shift was welcome - such a cool job to read about. I definitely felt the trauma of the author, which I think could turn some off, but I appreciated the human piece.

Tell Me Everything is a unique blend of Erika’s PI work on the sexual assault committed by college football players and recruits with her personal history of sexual assault.

I love the true crime aspect of this novel. The civil suit based on Title IX violations is riveting, frustrating, and heartbreaking. The story provides a good starting point for discussing the culture, the sport, and the responsibility to the women involved.

The memoir portion is just as raw as the true-crime victim story but more unstructured. At times, I feel like Erika is still working through her trauma. I completely understand why these two stories are tangled. But in speaking her own truth, the story loosens like she’s still trying to find her way. And this breaks my heart even more because I’m not sure how one recovers from a sexual assault.

This is a book truly unlike any other I've read. It blends so many different genres and does so SEAMLESSLY. This was interesting and propulsive I highly recommend this to all readers that can handle tough stuff, you won't be able to put this down.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand it was really interesting and made me feel like I was behind the scenes of an episode of Law and Order. On the other hand, it is a difficult book full of terrible things and terrible people.

I don't remember ever hearing about this case in the news, but I would have been around 12 by the time it got settled. It is scary to think about how little the University cared about its students. There is still a terrible culture at some university's and throughout their sports programs. I will remember this book when I send my kids off to college.

I can't imagine the emotions that the author went through. It's easy from an outside perspective to say "Never talk to those people again!" I acknowledge that there is more to it than I can understand. I also wonder how the women who are involved in this story feel about the release of this book. I get that the author lived this too, but is it really her place to dig back up and air out for everyone to read? Especially when anyone can go back and search through the details of what actually happened? I can't imagine that I would be too happy about all of this being brought up again 15 years after the fact, probably just so the author could make money off of it. These are just my opinions.

I thought this book was endlessly fascinating. Though it deals with an incredibly difficult subject matter, Erika Krouse did a wonderful job of speaking about this topic respectfully, intelligently, and in an engaging tone. Her story is entirely unique, and I love the way she chose to write about the investigation. This book is informative, emotional, and illuminating. Krouse did a superb job of captivating her readers from the very first sentence.

Of course, given the subject of this story, it's advisable for anyone who has experienced similar circumstances to proceed with caution. It's important to read these types of books and to not shy away from the awful, terrible things that happen in the world. But it's equally important to protect yourself as a reader, too. Pace it out if you have to.

Erika Krouse has always had the look about her that makes complete strangers open up and spill their secrets. Because of this, she finds herself working as a private investigator even though she has absolutely no experience. She is assigned a sexual assault case that she knows she should turn down because of sexual assault she experienced as a child. Yet she finds herself saying yes in the hopes that she can make some kind of difference. Over the next five years, the book follows her investigation with the case as well as her personal life, both past and present.
This book had me very intrigued at the beginning, but I found it quickly started to drag out and become repetitive as the story went on. The work they did on the case was very important and inspiring, but overall this book just didn't hold my interest.

Thank you netgalley for the ARC!

Compelling story where author confronts her own sexual abuse as a child while working as a private investigator on a rape case. While working on a legal case the author also has to deal with her difunctional family and the abuse she endured as a child.